The Can’t-Miss Art Exhibitions in Atlanta This July
As summer hits its stride, the city’s museums and galleries are pulling out the stops, with shows of work by Faith Ringgold, Campbell Addy and more.
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This last year has been a landmark one for the Atlanta art scene. The inauguration of the Atlanta Art Fair—which opened for the first time in October of 2024 and coincided with the third edition of Kendra Walker’s Atlanta Art Week—was accompanied by blockbuster exhibitions from the likes of Ming Smith, Amanda Williams, Sally Mann, Ryoji Ikeda and more. That momentum hasn’t slowed; if anything, it’s a defining feature of the city’s summer season.
Atlanta Art Fair will return in September, bringing the art world back to Atlanta, and while there are sure to be more showstopper exhibitions opening alongside the fair, this month’s lineup of museum and gallery shows is proof that in Atlanta, art is a year-round affair. Through July, there are shows featuring photography, drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking, tackling themes of immigration, mythology, American history and psychoanalysis. In other words, there’s something for everyone.
Brayan Enriquez, "Like Hills Made of Sand"
- Atlanta Center for Photography
- Through August 23, 2025
Captured during the artist’s first visit to Mexico, when he reunited with his extended family, the works in this exhibition are part travel documentary and part personal diary. On this trip, Enriquez met many family members for the first time and was reunited with others who had been deported from the U.S. over a decade ago. This exhibition feels especially timely given the current state of immigration policies and the complexities of the migrant experience in 2025. Featuring more traditional portraits interspersed with askance moments and family memorabilia, the photographs tell a narrative exploring migration, family and belonging.
Campbell Addy, "The Stillness of Elegance"
- SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion and Film
- Through September 7, 2025
The exhibition presents Addy’s fashion and portrait photography as a sampling of the artist’s entire oeuvre—and a striking compilation it is. I found the most miraculous artworks in this exhibition to be those with an Afrofuturist aesthetic. Vogue India, Naomi Campbell II (2022), for example, portrays an angular silhouette standing against a ground of turmeric orange and curry yellow. The figure holds what appears to be a purse in one outstretched hand, their long hair caught in a breeze. The scene feels almost post-apocalyptic, its figure the lone survivor of some unseen obliteration. Carrying only a single item, their sharp shoulders cut a strong pose and exude confidence. The effect is flooring.
Faith Ringgold, "Seeing Children"
- High Museum of Art
- Through October 12, 2025
American artist Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) is widely known and celebrated for her paintings and multimedia art, and especially her narrative quilts. However, her award-winning accomplishments as a children’s book creator are less well known. This summer, the High will present the most comprehensive exhibition to date of original paintings and drawings made for more than a dozen of her children’s books, with more than 100 works—several of which have never previously been exhibited. Together, the artworks in the exhibition illuminate critical aspects of Ringgold’s practice and convey how Ringgold, a lifelong educator, presents children as creative, purposeful art makers. The exhibition is the latest in the High’s popular series celebrating children’s book artists and authors.
Hanna Newman, "The Hunt"
- whitespace gallery
- Through July 19, 2025
"The Hunt" is a sculptural installation that explores the complexity of the self and the inner dualities of the psyche: ego and shadow, control and surrender, fragmentation and wholeness. Drawing from mythology, archetypal imagery and personal memory, this exhibition is a symbolic space where the desire for discovery meets the resistance of the known. In a suspended moment of tension, opposing forces come into play—the restrained and the free, the known and the unknown. The hunter, mounted to the wall and frozen in tension, raises an arrow toward a freer, roaming aspect of the self. Here, the self is not singular but split, circling itself in ritual, confrontation and longing. It is in this moment of confrontation that transformation becomes possible.
Isaac Mehki, "The King"
- Hawkins Headquarters
- July 12 - August 31, 2025
The King & The Great Whitewasher is the second chapter of a long-term film project that reimagines the legend of St. George and the Dragon through a contemporary lens. Drawing on the cultural, political and spiritual narratives of the American South, the work juxtaposes these forces in ways that unsettle and provoke, offering space for reflection and cathartic healing. While rooted in cinema, the project branches into painting, photography, performance and sculpture, each chapter staged as a live public event that blurs the line between ritual and spectacle. Costumes, objects and photographs become vessels for myth, history and autobiography, woven into a surreal and symbol-laden lexicon. Christian iconography, Southern folklore and critiques of both historical conservatism and modern alt-right ideologies collide in a deeply personal narrative that interrogates the role of the artist within Western tradition.
Sergio Suarez, "Traces of an Unseen Fire"
- MOCA Georgia
- Through August 16, 2025
Fire, in its perpetual becoming, not only consumes, but also reveals, transforms and leaves barely legible marks in the fissures of the visible. "Traces of an Unseen Fire," Sergio Suarez’s solo exhibition at MOCA GA, is an exercise in speculative archaeology—a cartography of the sacred that seeps through layers of time, matter and language, where printmaking, ceramics and cosmological imagery intertwine to question the possible futures buried within the present. At a historical moment when the future appears to us as a horizon in flames, "Traces of an Unseen Fire" reminds us that fire is not a metaphor but an agent of chemical metamorphosis. It does not purify; it transmutes. And we must transmute the rubble of history into a narrative that allows us to inhabit chaos without domesticating it—an ontology of the residual that understands the past not as origin but as an active geological layer where time not only dissolves, it will also solidify the beginning of something else, something we may not yet know how to name: traces of another world.
The Private Collections Salon
- Jackson Fine Art
- July 19 - September 13, 2025
Entering its eleventh edition, the "Private Collections Salon & Sale" is a mind-boggling array of 120 artworks by sixty modern and contemporary photographers. Showcasing work from artists like Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Marilyn Minter and Henry Cartier-Bresson, this salon evokes the tradition of the French Salon des Beaux-Arts, a historic practice which was a melting pot of artistic talent. With works hanging from every wall in the gallery, the Private Collections Salon carries forward this tradition, placing works by modern photographers alongside their contemporary counterparts. Walking through, conversations are sparked, novel connections are made and creatives from all walks of life interact. Bring your most discerning eye and a jovial attitude—this is not one to be missed.
